SAP Transportation Management Ocean Planning Guide

SAP S/4HANA Transportation Management solution has firmly cemented itself as a best-of-breed option for companies looking to implement TMS, hitting Gartner's magic quadrant in 2022 yet again. However, many customers are still looking to understand the capabilities of SAP TM solution at a greater detail within a specific mode of transport. In North America, it is fairly typical to see shippers utilizing SAP TM focus on Road/Truck mode of transport in the first phase of their TMS implementation, given the dominance of this mode in the US and Canada regions as well as SAP's well established track record with managing Road transportation planning. But Ocean mode of transport is often the close second in importance for North American SAP customers, especially in the last couple of years with many shippers battling supply chain issues and new constraints around steamship line capacity availability and container visibility throughout its journey.

As a result, we've decided to put together this guide that outlines the overall capabilities of SAP Transportation Management around Ocean mode of transport and its integration with other SAP and non-SAP solutions.

As with any other mode, the demand for ocean transportation planning within SAP TM comes from either SAP ERP orders/deliveries (sales orders, purchase orders, outbound deliveries, inbound deliveries, etc.) which are integrated out-of-the-box or forwarding orders which can be created directly in SAP TM system. In cases where these orders and deliveries represent a full container, a TM document called Container Unit, representing a single physical container, will typically be created automatically via the functionality in Freight Unit Building called shortcut planning. Otherwise, if multiple orders need to be consolidated into a single container, Freight Unit documents are automatically created instead of Container Units. These Freight Units can then go through a Container Consolidation planning process in TM to create the Container Units. In either case, we ultimately want to create a Container Unit document in SAP TM for every physical container that we are planning, which then becomes the foundation for our ocean transportation planning.

From that point we can take the Container Unit document and split it into multiple stages as needed. For example, in case of an export scenario, the first (aka pre-carriage) stage could represent drayage of container from a shipping point to a port terminal on a truck, whereas the second stage can represent the actual main carriage on an ocean vessel from port of origin to port of destination. In cases where a single freight forwarder takes care of drayage and main carriage and charges the shipper a single agreed upon rate, both of these Container Unit stages can be assigned to a single Freight Booking in SAP TM. Whereas in cases where drayage is handled by and paid to a different carrier than the main ocean carriage, these 2 stages can be assigned to separate execution documents - Road Freight Order for drayage, and Ocean Freight Booking for the the ocean leg - each of them calculating their own freight charges and going through the appropriate freight settlement process independently.

This typical document flow in SAP TM ocean planning can be represented by the following diagram:

With the introduction of SAP Business Network for Logistics (aka BN4L, formerly known as SAP Logistics Business Network or LBN) shippers have an opportunity to extend the above document flow further by digitizing their interactions with carriers and logistics service providers. Specifically, we usually see the following use cases come into play in the context of Ocean Transportation Planning: Freight Collaboration (FC) Sending a Drayage Freight Order to carrier for confirmationSending an Ocean Freight Booking to carrier for confirmationReceiving invoices from carriersProcessing disputes for carrier invoicesGlobal Track & Trace (GTT)

• Receiving actual events (departure, arrival, delay, etc.) from carriers

Carriers that have the necessary IT capabilities can choose to interact with SAP BN4L via a standard published API, while other carriers that are not ready to utilize the API/EDI approach can choose to interact with SAP BN4L via Web UI portal.

It is worth noting that receiving actual events from carriers can be accomplished either via BN4L Freight Collaboration or Global Track & Trace. However, we generally recommend that customers take the GTT path, as it offers more flexibility and is generally where SAP is continuing to innovate and improve, whereas event tracking via Freight Collaboration is more of a "stop-gap" solution. Just keep in mind that GTT requires additional licensing from SAP, on top of the standard licensing for BN4L Freight Collaboration.

Regardless of whether you choose to receive actual events via Freight Collaboration or GTT, you still have to decide on where you are going to source those events from. While there is always an option for carriers to report actual events manually via SAP BN4L’s portal, many customers choose to utilize third-party visibility providers to get the data electronically, with Project44 being arguably the most popular option for SAP BN4L customers. In the context of this specific guide, Project44 has an Ocean Visibility offering that will provide visibility data for a journey of a particular container. Again, keep in mind that this requires yet another license to be purchased either from SAP (who can resell Project44 solutions) or directly from Project44.

Once a typical flow of actual events is all in place, you are then able to see the history and current status of a particular container throughout various transactions and screens in your SAP landscape as depicted in the diagram below:

TBD